Angel 4.15 Orpheus

[thebratqueen]

I know, maybe I shouldn't be bitching about an episode with a war going on but what can I say? We all deal with stress in our own way.

So - Angel.

First off, I have to say, called it! I so called it. I am the queen of calling it. Called it, called it, called it.

What? Like you've never seen me smug before?

Okay, on to the ep.

...

Eeeeeeeh God do I have to?

Okay, it's no secret that I tend not to like the work of Mere Smith. However I think it should also be fairly obvious that I've given her many pats on the back ever since Loyalty. I think she's done a fine job with all the episodes she's had from Loyalty until now.

Until now, of course, being the operative term.

Don't get me wrong. The episode had some good points. It's just that most of those points were outside of the dialogue.

Of course the one key shining moment was the Wes/Willow interaction. It was nice. Believable. And naturally Aly and Alexis are most wonderful together.

Willow and Fred, too, were kind of cute. I could support this ship should there ever be one. And I hope there will. I hope Willow comes and joins the cast fulltime. I suspect much of what we saw tonight was a tryout - showing how she could interact with all of the characters, although I'm just realizing now as I type this that she never really interacted with Lorne. That's a shame. But yeah - Willow/Fred is cute, Willow joining the cast = AOK by me.

But there was all this other stuff.

You remember back when I outlined some of Mere Smith's fatal flaws? Yeah, well, here they were. In no particular order:

So-called humor over accurate characterization. As for example Faith's "wind" line. Hi that would be BUFFY you're attempting to write there. Faith doesn't talk like that. Also the line makes no sense.

This fatal flaw also combined with her other one, which is writing the characters as though they have the IQ of cream cheese, when Wesley turned into an utter moron for the sake of a not very funny line explaining why Willow was there. I'm sorry but Wes's babble about mystical forces made no sense. He's not stupid. Likewise he wouldn't have reacted with utter surprise to the idea of calling Willow in the first place because, as he himself says, she was the first one to resoul Angel anyway. I'm not saying Wes had to make the call himself, obviously he's been busy, I'm just saying he wouldn't have been sitting there like he'd never once thought of the concepts of "Willow" and "Angel's soul" having a connection of some kind.

And let's talk Cordy. Cordy who has forgotten that she's supposed to NOT be acting evil around people who don't know that she's evil, ie EVERYONE. I was fine for last week when her reactions were confined to things that the other characters couldn't see, but tonight was awful. She was lip-servicing her way through the good talk without any motivation for why she would suddenly be unable to act as well as she had in the past. I could've bought it based on her reactions to Angelus, but her throwing Connor against a wall because of Faith made no sense at all.

And again with the low IQ. Willow sits there and outlines her exact plan to save Angel's soul, which to remind you was to do a spell to shoot something at the jar and break the glass, and Cordy's reaction to this is to, of course, wrap the jar up in bubble wrap, put it in a safe stuffed with a feather pillow and then lock the... oh, wait, no. Her reaction was to put it UNPROTECTED ON A TABLE. Because THAT makes sense.

And we go on and on from there. This episode was so frustrating for me. It could've been absolutely amazing and instead I was cringing the whole time and forcing myself to peek out from time to time so I could see Aly and Alexis interacting and watch the magic fight which was cool, if frustrating in the actual details.

Other quibbles: Mandy does not need a backstory. Giving Mandy a backstory and making it a song Angel obsesses over is not funny. In fact it just repeats a joke we've already heard, viz. the fact that Angel likes Mandy, a joke which is now over two years old. If you wanted to make that funny pick a song like Mandy and go with that.

Speaking of repeating jokes, let's talk about the dialogue. The cutting off a curse word after the first letter thing? Getting tired now. And the "higher being" "ultimate evil" exchange was funny the first time I saw it, which was Buffy and Amy. I'd go on but I wrote an entire essay about how to do humor once so at this point I'm just repeating myself.

And the lameness of the other jokes sapped what things could have been funny for me. Like the saving a puppy thing could've gotten me to crack a smile except the way it was executed, esp in the context of everything else, just made me sigh. Reason being it was obvious by then that it was only there because Mere thought the image in and of itself was funny and, well, refer to my essay for more on that.

I'm not saying it was "House Always Wins" bad. I mean Fred was actually tolerable and of course Aly and Alexis did kick-ass jobs. But this was sloppy, sloppy stuff and not all the directing or acting in the world managed to save it.

Sigh.